Home

How to Put Text in a Table in Word 2016

|
Updated:  
2016-03-26 07:22:26
|
From The Book:  
Word 2010 For Dummies
Explore Book
Buy On Amazon

Text fills a Word 2016 table on a cell-by-cell basis. A cell can be empty or contain anything from a single letter to multiple paragraphs. The cell changes size to accommodate larger quantities of text.

  • Within a cell, text is formatted just as it is elsewhere in Word, including margins and tabs.

  • Although a single cell can deftly handle vast quantities of text, graphic artists don't put a lot of text into a single cell. Consider another way to present such information.

  • Don't format text inside a cell with first-line indents. Although it's possible, such formatting can be a pain to manipulate.

    Show the ruler when you work with formatting text in a table: Click the View tab, and in the Show group, place a check mark by the Ruler item.

Text appears in whichever cell the insertion pointer is blinking. Type your text and it wraps to fill the cell. Don't worry if it doesn't look right; you can adjust the cell size after you type the text.

  • To move to the next cell, press the Tab key.

  • To move back one cell, press Shift+Tab.

  • Pressing Tab at the end of a row moves the insertion pointer to the first cell in the next row.

  • Pressing the Tab key while the insertion pointer is in the table's bottom-right cell adds a new row to the table.

  • To produce a tab character within a cell, press Ctrl+Tab. Even so:

    Putting tabs into table cells is not recommended. It makes the cell formatting all funky.

    When you press the Enter key in a cell, you create a new paragraph in the cell, which probably isn't what you want.

    The Shift+Enter key combination (a soft return) can be used break up long lines of text in a cell.

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.